Pandas rely upon a specific diet and habitat. They typically
live far away from human populations on gently sloping hillsides. Their diet is
made up of exclusively bamboo. China invests billions to protect its panda
habitat and conserve the 1,600 remaining endangered supported by this habitat.
China has instituted many conservation programs limiting the timber harvesting
that had greatly threatened this habitat. But now it seems that with the timber
harvesters are under control the bamboo is still being devastated before the
pandas can get it.

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Vanessa Hull, a doctoral student at Michigan State University,
who has been researching the pandas over the last seven years, has found that
horses have been infiltrating the bamboo buffet.

"It didn't take particular panda
expertise to know that something was amiss when we'd come upon horse-affected
bamboo patches. They were in the middle of nowhere and it looked like someone
had been in there with a lawn mower," Hull said.

Alarmed by the increasing devastation, Hull
learned that keeping a horse in this region serves a similar function as
maintaining a bank account. Because horses are prohibited from grazing in
designated grazing areas, to prevent them from competing for food with cattle,
some farmers have been letting horses graze unattended in forests. When these
horse-keeping farmers need cash, they track down their horses in the forest and
sell them.

Eventually, some Wolong farmers, though not
traditionally horse-keepers, learned from horse-keeping friends who lived
outside of the reserve that they too could cash in by keeping horses--and
letting them loose to graze unattended in Wolong. Where, unfortunately, they
would compete for food with pandas.

Over time, the popularity of this practice
soared. In 1998, only 25 horses lived in Wolong. By 2008, 350 horses lived
there in 20 to 30 herds.

To understand the scope of the problem, Hull
and her colleagues put the same type of GPS collars they were using to track
pandas on one horse in each of four herds they studied. Then, over a year they
compared the activity of the horses with that of three collared adult pandas in
some of the same areas, and combined resulting data with habitat data.

The researchers discovered that the galloping
gourmets are indeed big on bamboo--and are drawn to the same sunny, gently
sloped spots as pandas. Pandas and horses eat about the same amount of bamboo,
but a herd of more than 20 horses created veritable feeding frenzies,
destroying areas that the reserve was established to protect.